A Deems Taylor Award–winning music journalist, record producer, songwriter, editor, and author, Bruce Pollock captures the frenzy of 1969, an insane, wonderful, sometimes frightening year in music and social history. After the peaceful, unifying mood of Woodstock promised a musical utopia, the violence of Altamont unraveled the hippie dream. Campus protests and inner city riots seemed to emerge everywhere, amid musical manifestos for revolution. The Beatles imploded and Bob Dylan ducked out for Nashville. But new and powerful strains of music also emerged, from the Grateful Dead's spacey guitar jams to the radical art-punk of the Velvet Underground, and the founding of heavy metal by Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath.